When I grow up, I’d like to be more fun. I think I take myself too seriously most of the time. I’ve spent so much of my life focused on growing up that I’m not sure what grown up is meant to look like. I’d really like to be good at playing.

I want to believe that I’ll make it through – that I won’t succumb to the fate that haunts me. Sometimes I do think about what I’ve come through so far and how it hasn’t happened yet – the day I can’t quite climb over the shadows, but I haven’t given up yet. Not quitting requires more energy than anything else in my life. But what would I be if I just gave up?

I grew up on the sound of trains, which is probably why I like riding them so much. The rumble forward and the side to side roll of the carriages jostling along has always been comforting to me. Like a carriage of one hundred conversations I guess, that rumble always…

It felt like a tearing and stretching burn when I started to use it again. It was like my trachea was still recovering from how searing my words had been the last time I spoke up. My tongue was heavy and soft, it had lost all it’s sharpness and dexterity. Like learning to walk again, it hurt at first.

So I’m a couple of days behind in #thedaily500. Some life happened that required my attention. Because most of what I’ve been writing for these vignettes has been accumulated experience, it’s been challenging to create enough distance in the last few days to make sense of what is happening right now and what I might learn from it in the coming weeks and years. Sometimes the liminal space is just a matter of the words I do write and the words I don’t.

You push open the door and realise you can hear the crackle of the fireplace and the sound of Jakob Dylan on the stereo. Then there’s the unmistakeable sound another person makes when you share thirty square metres.

We hope that we belong to each other but in the moments of crisis, we learn whether we are flotsam, jetsam or trash. We learn what we are capable of, when we’ll do anything to stay afloat ourselves, at any cost.

Anger demands you pay attention and answer the question of what is right, what is true and what is good. Even if we learn we were wrong, anger is part of our pathway to truth. It is brave and beautiful work to be angry, especially on your own behalf.